Supermassive black holes put a brake on stellar births

submited by

Style Pass

2021-07-20 10:30:05

July 20, 2021

by Royal Astronomical Society

Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state of the art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, the researchers resolve a 20-year long debate on the formation of stars. Joanna Piotrowska, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, will present the new work today at the virtual National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2021).

Star formation in galaxies has long been a focal point of astronomy research. Decades of successful observations and theoretical modeling resulted in our good understanding of how gas collapses to form new stars both in and beyond our own Milky Way. However, thanks to all-sky observing programs like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), astronomers realized that not all galaxies in the local Universe are actively star-forming—there exists an abundant population of "quiescent" objects which form stars at significantly lower rates.